The Emphasis Type="Italic"Hero/EmphasisEmpha

Authors: Olivier Fournout

Publish Date: 2016/02/11

Volume: 141, Issue: 1, Pages: 27-46

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Abstract

Textbooks and manuals on management suggest that managers are heroes who deal with difficult problems of collective adaptation and change American films are similarly built on the premise of a hero confronted with extremely difficult situations What if this hero figure promoted for so long in both management literature and the American film industry was the same at the structural level This paper will attempt to clearly define the ethical performance of heroes that is perhaps shared by the imagination industry hollywood and the workplace on the long run We shall follow this picture of a heroleader in the ethics of business and cinema through a large corpus of movies and writings on management and provide a set of six features for examining both a common heroic structure we shall call the HeroLeader Matrix“I’m the king of the world” the hero of the 1997 film Titanic happily announces from the prow of the huge transatlantic steamer The model of a hero Hollywood here offers the world is no less than the body of a democratic king—young open minded adventurous clever surfing towards the Promised Land and in loveIn a 40page chapter of The age of Heretics A history of the Radical Thinkers who Reinvented Corporate Management 1996 called ‘Parzival’s dilemma’ Kleiner compares the modern manager to the knight of the Round Table Parzival who becomes the Grail King but who first has to find the courage within himself to ask the wounded keeper of the Grail “What afflicts thee uncle” just as a manager or an Organization Development consultant helps heal organizations by finding the courage to follow his own intuitions and ask unsettling questions about the current state of affairs Kleiner 1996 pp 186–225In this paper I will focus on a question initially raised by sociologists of the cinema considering the relationship between societies that produce films and the societies created in films Kracauer 1947 Jarvie 1970 and will apply it to examining the relationship between management and American movies that is to say between one of the fundamental ethics governing modern economics and one of the most popular manifestations of the imagination industry HollywoodThis paper has six sections First is an overview of what ethics might mean when it comes to comparing organizational behaviour and representations in popular culture Second is a review of the literature exploring the links between management and cinema In the third section I will justify the hypothesis of a longterm pattern of action shared by the movie industry and managerial culture The fourth section will present research scope and methodology as applied to a longterm corpus of writings on management and films of fiction Then getting to the core of content analysis I shall describe the profile of a HeroLeader in business and cinema and provide a set of six features for examining it a heroic structure I shall call the HeroLeader Matrix that spells out the nuts and bolts of the HeroLeader’s communicative power In the final section I shall discuss these results noting certain difficulties and calling for further investigation in two directions

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